By George Esunge Fominyen
18 goals in 18 matches in La Liga this season. That makes Samuel Eto'o the leading goal scorer in the Spanish football top flight. The Cameroonian has hit his most deadly form after being besieged by injuries in the last two years and branded an outcast last summer by his current coach - Pep Guardiola.The Lion in him has made a statement in the realm of soccer strikers - the Pichichi is back!
Who would have forseen this state of play in the heat of the last European summer?
Eto'o had barely crawled out of injury. Although he managed the feat of scoring 16 goals in 18 games played that season for FC Barcelona and 5 goals for Cameroon to finish top scorer at Africa Cup of Nations in Ghana, his skills on the turf made less news than the 'Afro' hair-do he had grown and comments by his new club coach who wanted to see him gone. At the end of May 2008, the striker dropped to an all-time low when he lost it and headbutted a reporter -Boney Philip- at an Indomitable Lions pre-match press conference.
After making public excuses on live national television, Eto'o set his mind to make Pep Guardiola chew his words. Amidst rumours linking him to Inter Milan and million dollar offers from obscure teams in Uzbekistan, he stepped up his work rate at training in Barcelona and was rarely under media spotlight while his coach continued to rant about his plans to do without the man who scored who was best goal scorer in Spain in the year Barcelona won La Liga and Champions League.
Some pundits really doubted that he would ever recover his potential to the point that when I proposed him (on the Times Online debate) as "good buy" for Manchester United in the event of Ronaldo moving to Real Mardrid:
"If the lad wants to go, let him go. Sell Ronaldo for £75m and get two other players. Barcelona are relinquishing Samuel Eto'o. He can play centre, wide, and behind two strikers. He can score goals and is an interesting proposition. He came back from injury last season to finish the highest scorer at Barcelona, playing 17 games and scoring 16 goals. At that rate he, too, could be worth 40 goals a season to United."
Martin Samuel -several times Sport Writer of the Year award winner in England replied:
"There are a lot of ifs with Eto’o. If he stays fit, if he adapts to the Premier League, and if United find a way of accommodating three strikers (Eto’o, Rooney and Tevez) rather than two strikers and a midfield player coming from deep like Ronaldo, who gives everything you say Eto’o does, but guaranteed."
Well, Manchester United went on to buy an additional striker - Berbatov - and succeeded to keep Ronaldo. On bare staistics neither Ronaldo nor Berbatov has scored the number of (league) goals Eto'o has thrusted into nets this season. Not even if you add both their tallies (8+5 =13)!
Samuel Eto'o's resilience may be understood from his background. Here is a youngman raised in New Bell, a difficult neighbourhood in Douala, where poverty sings to you day and night. A place known for the inglorious and utterly despicable prison it plays host to. If you are a kid and you manage to make it out of there, you have only one ambition: to succeed.
On the occasion of the France versus Cameroon friendly in October 2000, our young radio station Mount Cameroon FM decided to make a difference in its match coverage. I covered the game live from the then Eto'o family home in New Bell. We arrived Douala (Cameroon's economic capital) at night and New Bell had no street lights or names. Even in such darkness one could see poverty around the place. It was not hell but it was far from paradise.
Every time he scores for Cameroon and Barcelona, images of his father sitting in the middle of a hot crowded living room and his mother running in and out of her room trying not to see any tackles on his son's leg by French players come back to me. They might not have been wealthy but their welcome was generous and the faith in their son's seriousness was sincere.
Back then his father talked of his fighting spirit, his determination to stay in Cameroon's starting line up (at the time he was still in contention with Joseph Desire Job to play alongside Patrick Mboma) and the ambition to play regular first team football at Mallorca where he had been loaned by.... Real Mardrid. He did become a key member of both Mallorca and Cameroon.
Would you expect such a guy to give up? I didn't.
He is another example of what I have described before as the Cameroonian mystique. That sphinx-like capacity of our athletes to be born again. Milla coming from retirement and amateur football to score 4 goals at the age of 38 during World Cup 1990, and Françoise Mbango winning gold at the tripple jump event in Beijing 2008 after 4 years of recess.
Fuelled by that fierce determination, will-power, ambition; pride and never -say –die attitude of the Cameroonian competitors, Eto'o - the pichichi - has made it back to the top. FC Barcelona have scored 56 goals and are top of the Spanish league with 50 points - a record after 19 games played. This is down to the poisnonous attacking trident of the messianic Messi,the improved Thierry Henri and the magical Eto'o. Pierrot Ménès, Yahoo! France's football blogger, argues he is the best finisher on the football planet at present and names him in his best eleven of 2008.
As I watched Eto'o with the ball in hand, pacing calmly while others argued in the seconds before he scored his 18th league goal from the penalty spot against Deportivo la Coruna, I flashed back to 8 October 2005. That was how Wome took his responsibility as the penalty taker in the Indomitable Lions while Eto'o and Song where busy arguing with Egyptian goalkeeper. Wome kicked and missed; it was his reponsibility which he stood up to. At 27, it is time for Eto'o step up to national responsibility and lead Cameroon to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
From the bit I know, he is understands it is the battle that must be won in 2009. But as Christians say 'man cannot live on bread alone' - so too the Indomitable Lions cannot qualify on Eto'o's merits alone. Which raises questions like: who partners Eto'o at the attack? What team and tactics for the Indomitable Lions in 2009? That's another story which we shall come back to. Clearly, if he can be the locomotive of a return to the Fifa World Cup for Cameroon, I would field eleven Eto'os in my best team of 2009 and certainly many more Cameroonians would agree then that the Pichichi is back indeed!
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